an RPG blog

Month: January 2004

I’m having a groovy time with Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance 2, the sequel that I’ve been eagerly anticipating since 2001! It’s over a year late, I believe, but it rocks. All new classes (you can import your old characters, but they get captured in a cut-scene at the start and you have to unlock them later in the game): male human Barbarian, female half-elf Monk, male dwarven Rogue, female human Cleric, male elven Necromancer. Like BG:DA, while it’s a lot of fun solo, the real attraction is two-player cooperative mode.
I’ve played the first couple of levels as a duo, first with Jeff (he was Barbarian, I was Cleric) and then with Paul (he took the Monk and I was Cleric once again–just like real D&D, having a Cleric in the party is literally a life-saver). I also have played about six levels as the Monk, which I suspect is the toughest to play solo. I actually had to cheat a bit, by restarting the game at an earlier point and importing my later character in order to gather some more healing potions. Unlike the first game, there doesn’t seem to be any shop that you can visit in the first six levels, not even once you get to the city of Baldur’s Gate! Maybe it’s hidden, or you have to unlock it somehow, but being stuck with only the healing potions that you can scrounge off of fallen foes is too much of a limitation for my meager skills to overcome, at least as the Monk, since she has no healing magic and limited area-effect abilities (sweeping blow hits every enemy around you, but it takes a bunch of magic points and for maximum effect you have to let yourself be surrounded by enemies, which tends to mean taking a bunch of hits). Even so, I wasn’t able to clear the spider-breeding pits, which had presented no real obstacle to the Barbarian/Cleric team.